A machine to machine (M2M) communication refers to any communication scheme which does not require human intervention in the process of communication. In other words, the M2M communication refers to a communication for providing persons or intelligent equipment with object information using communication networks, or allowing persons or intelligent equipment to control states of objects. The M2M communication may be variously referred to as a machine type communication (MTC), Internet of things (IoT), a smart device communication (SDC), a machine oriented communication (MOC), or an object to object intelligent network (O2N).
A variety of technology such as a location awareness, a context awareness, an augmented reality, and so forth may be introduced in an M2M service or an M2M network. Accordingly, a purpose of the M2M communication is to further improve the quality and stability of M2M communication services, while automatically performing operations customized to users and/or situations without a human intervention or in a state in which a human intervention is minimized.
An M2M network communication may be employed for overcoming a variety of social issues (e.g., a disaster prevention, an energy saving) through u-City, u-Health, u-Transportation, u-Environment industries, and so forth. An M2M service associated with the M2M network communication may include a remote metering, a building/facility management, a vending machine management, an indoor lighting adjustment, a traffic information/vehicle control, an emergency rescue, a fire alarm, a security alarm, a telemetric, a wireless payment, and so forth. Particularly, the M2M service has recently been applied to medical equipment such as a pulsometer and an electrocardiograph. Accordingly, the M2M service is being actively applied to a variety of e-Health fields (e.g., a remote patient monitoring).
An M2M communication is an object-to-object communication. Therefore, the M2M communication may have different characteristics from a human-to-human (H2H) communication. Essential techniques may be changed due to such difference of characteristics. Necessary characteristics may be changed according to use fields of the M2M communication. Standard groups of all the countries of the world, including ETSI (European Telecommunication Standard Institute), have conducted research and development for successful M2M communication standardization.
Particularly, the present ETSI standard recognizes an M2M network, an M2M gateway, and an M2M device as ‘resources’ by applying the RESTful architecture, and adopts a scheme of managing the resources through a plurality of methods (e.g., CREATE/RETRIEVE/UPDATE/DELETE methods). Access to the resources is possible only if there is universal resource identifier (URI) information. In order to increase efficiency of access to the resources, a concept of ‘announced resource’ consisting of attribute of resource has been introduced.
A typical resource management according to the ETSI standard is performed based on the announced resources. Accordingly, a typical resource management may be effective as a scheme of finding a primary resource. However, in the case that a failure occurs in a called announced resource, the typical resource management merely processes as a failure of an access to the corresponding resource. Therefore, a resource fault recovery scheme may be necessary such as a replacement with another resource in the case that a failure occurs in the announced resource.
In addition, in the case that a specific resource is frequently accessed, there may be a need for minimizing or optimizing a preparation time or a response time for use of the corresponding resource, by considering a frequency of use associated with the corresponding resource.
For example, a typical M2M service according to the ETSI standard may provide e-Health service for a patient treatment. In this case, when a treatment device does not work properly, an access to the corresponding treatment device is merely processed as failure, without considering a substitute resource. Even in the case of medical devices for a repetitive (or continuous) treatment, the frequency or history associated with use thereof is not considered. Therefore, the same preparation time (i.e., resource preparation time) is required whenever an M2M service is provided, thereby making it difficult to provide a rapid M2M service.